Apparently they have IRC logs of him first talking about selling the information to spammers or using it to go phishing, which makes it a little worse.

I would have said the same thing after discovering the stash. Not because I actually planned to do this but because the situation is bizzare and that's some sort of humiliating humour.

Couple that with how he reported it, the script he used to download the data, and everything else he did. You can't look at each action in isolation.

Casts doubt on any benign intent in my mind.